Dock Indicator Lights
Nat!:
Actually as it turns out, I am really using the indicator for the information “is a window of that app open ?” and I am doing this consistently. I have a pile of partially obscured windows layered on top of it other, where I basically know where what could be where approximately (spatial memory). As an example my Address Book is usually somewhere in the top left corner.
In practice, with an i7 and the maximum 8 GB of RAM, it does help for me to quit applications—and even reboot from time to time. Much of the memory hogging seems to be due to WebKit, though, so perhaps the new multi-process model in Lion will help. As far as auto-quitting and re-opening, it seems unlikely that Lion will have a better idea of which applications I would want quit than I do, and I worry that I will lose information or state, e.g. from Web pages that get reloaded.
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"In practice, with an i7 and the maximum 8 GB of RAM, it does help for me to quit applications—and even reboot from time to time. Much of the memory hogging seems to be due to WebKit, though, so perhaps the new multi-process model in Lion will help."
FWIW, in my experience with 10.6, rebooting doesn't help with 'teh snappy' unless you have something misbehaving pretty deep in the OS. My uptimes average around 4 weeks, and 'teh snappy' is just as good right before the reboot as it is after the reboot.
However, I do quit and restart everything that uses WebKit once a day. That's definitely a common key to maintaining 'teh snappy' without reboots.
(For example, I don't store .webarchives or .webloc files in EagleFiler, and that product quite politely does its WebKit importing in a separate process that it politely quits for you, so I don't have to quit EagleFiler between reboots. If I did use WebKit inside EagleFiler, I'd quit that once a day just like I do with my browsers, RSS apps, and a few other WebKit odds and ends such as iTunes after you've visited the store...)
If Lion does solve the WebKit non-purging problem, it'd actually give me a reason in favor of considering wanting it.
"FWIW, in my experience with 10.6, rebooting doesn't help with 'teh snappy' unless you have something misbehaving pretty deep in the OS. My uptimes average around 4 weeks, and 'teh snappy' is just as good right before the reboot as it is after the reboot."
I take it all back. I was wrong. I just rebooted 10.6.8 after an uptime of 34 days, paid close attention before and after, and there is definitely a touch more of 'teh snappy' immediately after.
Finder.app is somewhat a WebKit-like hog if you don't quit it every so often, which I don't, since quitting loses me my saved state for Spaces placement. So I do suspect Finder.app is involved. (If Lion preserves saved state for Spaces, which I'm guessing it doesn't, it'd give me a larger reason in favor of considering wanting it.)
